2024 was the 13th year of Double 12 and it was one the quietest to date. Taobao brought back the shopping festival after “cancelling” and rebranding it last year. Following the longest-ever Double 11, Double 12 saw a lack of consumer need, despite both Taobao and JD.com adding an extra day to the festival compared to last year. Many netizens expressed the feeling that they’d got everything they needed during Double 11.
The biggest news this Double 12, (perhaps not) surprisingly, is again about a top livestreamer and mainstay of streamer gossip, Li Jiaqi. This time, netizens shared an image purported to be a screen grab of their shopping cart that shows Li’s commission rates for each item, ranging from 10% to 20%, as well as the units sold, from 3,000 and over 100,000. As the items pictured were sold for prices between 269 RMB (36.93 USD) and 419 RMB (36.93 USD), many started calculating how much Li Jiaqi made this Double 12. On Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, the topic “Li Jiaqi’s livestream Commission exposed” (#李佳琦直播佣金曝光#) shot to the top of the Hot Search list with a whopping 300 million views.
However, Double 12 has fared better abroad this year. In Southeast Asia (SEA) countries such as Indonesia and Thailand, 12 December, right between Black Friday and Boxing Day, is one of the biggest shopping festivals of the year. TikTok Shop reported a 274% year-on-year (YoY) growth in gross merchandise value (GMV), Malaysia and Singapore also saw 138% and 127% growth, respectively. TikTok shop gained record-breaking sales in all major SEA markets and surpassed its Double 11 results.
This year saw the normalisation of sales events. Indeed, pundits noticed that Taobao had festivals almost every month in 2024, each lasting a fortnight, making 12 December just another monthly sale with no differentiation. With fierce competition from Pinduoduo (PDD), which had the longest Double 12 this year, (almost back to back with Double 11) and Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister app, which saw sales in hot categories growing 300% on average. The final results of Double 12 and whether e-commerce platforms such as Taobao will continue its regular discount strategy in 2025 remain to be seen.
